This blog on Texas education contains posts on accountability, testing, college readiness, dropouts, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues with additional focus at the national level.

By Lisa KoThe following article is presented in conjunction with the broadcast television premiere ofA Path Appearson PBS’s Independent Lens (airs Monday, January 26, February 2 & 9; check local listings for the date and time in your area).
With the exception of some counties in Nevada, prostitution is
illegal throughout the United States. But for every john or pimp
arrested, multiple girls and women — some of whom were forced into the
trade while still underage — are often arrested as well. Police
harassment and incarceration can subject these women to further injustice, violence, and abuse.
In Massachusetts, police were found to arrest women for prostitution-related offenses far more frequently than they arrest men.
The laws themselves are discriminatory: a woman can be arrested for
prostitution by standing on a street corner with intention to sell, but
johns can only be arrested if they’re caught discussing payments in
exchange for sex.
Elsewhere, law enforcement agencies are pursuing a different approach.
The Dallas Police Department views girls in prostitution as sexual assault victims, not criminals.
Instead of detention, they’re offered treatment, and seventy-five
percent of those who receive it don’t go back. Officers and social
workers build trust gradually with the girls, who are then more likely
to testify against their pimps. As a result, the number of pimps
convicted in the city has risen.
Advocates such as Carol Leigh, director of the Bay Area Sex Workers Advocacy Network, say that prostitution laws that criminalize selling sex can increase exploitation — a woman may be unwilling to report abuse to the police if she’s also at risk for arrest. Criminalization, as well as the conflation of sex trafficking and voluntary sex work, thwarts women from receiving vital health services and HIV/AIDS prevention.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

Stanley
Fish, “Neoliberalism and Higher Education”, wrote that few of his
colleagues had ever come across the term “neoliberalism” or knew what it
meant.

According to Fish, neoliberal principles are embedded
“in culture’s way of thinking [and its] institutions.” While the term
neoliberal is not frequently used, its supporters “mime and extend
neoliberal principles on every opportunity.”

On
university campuses in a relatively brief time this ideology has
changed the mission of academy from an institution searching for the
truth to a marketplace.

Privatization
is the cornerstone of neoliberalism. Privatization is touted as the
silver bullet that will solve the funding woes of “social security,
health care, and K-12 education, the maintenance of toll–roads,
railways, airlines, energy production, and communication systems.”
According to them, the private sector can run them cheaper and more
efficiently.

Americans, puzzled as to why
Europeans tolerate being taxed so heavily, ask why do Europeans support
such an expensive welfare state? The answer is that much of Europe is
based on communitarianism, a philosophy that emphasizes the connection
between the individual and the community rather than like the U.S. where
individualism is taken to an extreme.

Critics of neoliberalism such as Noam
Chomsky argue that neoliberalism benefits the rich and increases
inequalities “both within and between states.”

Cash strapped public universities,
after years of resistance, have succumbed to the failed philosophy of
the Reagan Revolution and reproduced a new narrative that claims that
the “withdrawal of the percentage of a state’s contribution to a
college’s operating expenses” actually increases demand for the
“product” of higher education which will lower the cost of delivering it
without the need to raise taxes.

Meanwhile, in order to offset the lack of public funding, administrators have
raised tuition with students becoming the primary consumers and
debt-holders. Iinstitutions have entered into research partnerships with
industry shifting the pursuit of truth to the pursuit of profits. To
accelerate this “molting,” they have “hired a larger and larger number of short-term, part-time adjuncts.”
This has created large armies of transient and disposable workers who
“are in no position to challenge the university’s practices or agitate
for “democratic rather than monetary goals.”

The problem is aggravated by the fact
that most administrators do not know what neoliberalism is. Many come
out of the humanities and the arts and those coming out of the social
sciences have a rudimentary knowledge of economics.

Neoliberalism in order to grow must
build a justification. Take the case of Shirley V. Svorny, a Professor
of Economics and former chair of the department. In a Los Angeles Times
Op-Ed piece titled, “Make College Cost More” (November 22, 2010),
Svorny argued that “Artificially low fees attract some students to
higher education who simply aren’t suited to the academic rigors of a
university.”Svorny blamed unqualified students for tuition increases.

As insulting as her premise is the
controversy was ignored by the administration and the faculty who
increasingly retire to their “professional enclaves…” concentrating on
their specialties that lack “a clear connection to the public interest.”

Most public colleges and universities
are nonprofit institutions in name only. They are marketplaces pursuing
neoliberal agendas.“Forty years of
privatization, stagnant wages, a weak economy, a lack of jobs, and
budget cuts have forced college administrators to find alternative forms of funding.”

The market logic is omnipotent. It
guides faculty, academic managers and managerial professionals seeking
commercial gain related to academic and nonacademic products. Faculty
and students are rewarded, and programs are developed whose purpose it
is to generate revenue with little attention paid to “pedagogical or
knowledge-related outcomes.”

Few studies are available on the
effects of neoliberal discourse on the behavior of students. Research on
the motivation, scope, and how they shift institutional priorities are
rare. Even Alexander W. Astin’s (1998) study fails “to connect [the
theme] to the rise of academic capitalism or the power of neoliberalism.”

Essential to understanding students’
motivations is knowing the pressures of conformity. The Italian
intellectual Antonio Gramsci called it the hegemonic project, i.e., the
process where the ruling class’s ideas and beliefs become the common
sense values of society. Through this process, neoliberalism becomes
internalized and unequivocally accepted.

From my experience, the hegemonic
process has had a profound impact on administrators, professors and
students in making their choices. Students select majors and research
topics in terms of marketability.

In my opinion, this mindset spells
doom for students at the lower margins as well as ethnic studies
programs. Since the 1990s, this has become very noticeable with many new
faculty lacking communitarian values common to those in the 1970s.

The importance of the common good has
given way to what is good for me, which overemphasizes personal
autonomy and individual rights. Asking what promotes the common good is
less common.

Neoliberalism also interferes with
understanding or dealing with community needs. This is very noticeable
among recently hired faculty members. They participate less in student
events and faculty governance.

According to Gramsci, the bourgeoisie
establishes and maintains its control through a cultural hegemony,
Therefore, it is natural that new professors who have spent most of
their lives in the academy adopt the culture of the university. For
them, bourgeois values represent the "natural" or "normal" values of
society.

Forty years ago, these bourgeois ideas were countered by a few ideological members who sought
to construct an academic community. These dissidents heavily influenced
intellectual discourse. This potential for political or ideological
resistance has weakened, however.

In today’s academy, ideology is
passé. There is noticeably less concern for the common good and more
with the individual product. New faculty spends less time in the
department and more time visiting colleagues in their discipline than meeting with students or Chicana/os studies faculty.

The first thing some new faculty
complain about is the size of their offices. When it is explained that
we have small offices by choice – the students have a reception area in
exchange for a reduction in the size of our faculty offices – they ask
who made this decision? The conversation is about their product and its
value.

Other faculty members spend more time
in departments of their discipline, although many of these departments
have refused to accept them as permanent members. It is the product that
is important and they believe it is enhanced by associating with scholars outside the Chicana/o community.

Part timers often do not want to do
anything to damage their product. Take the UNAM (National University of
Mexico) controversy: they ignored the political ramifications of
neoliberalism. It did not matter to them. Neither did the human rights
atrocities in Mexico, i.e., the disappearance of the 43 normalistas.

They are not sellouts in the popular
sense of the word. They care about the issues as long as they do not
affect the value of their product. Economics for them is an ideology and
supply and demand are the only important factors in their decisions,
Ultimately what is important is sustaining the value of the product they
are selling.

Nearly
all students displaced by Chicago's 2013 mass school closure enrolled
in schools with better academic ratings than their closed school.
However, only one-fifth landed at top-tier schools and nearly
one-quarter went to schools that were lower-performing than the
welcoming schools assigned to them by the district. This report tracks
the enrollment patters of nearly 11,000 students required to transition
to a new elementary schools after the closings. It also draws on
interviews with parents to understand how they navigated the enrollment
process and why some students ended up in their assigned school while
others ended up in schools that were higher- or lower-rated than those
assigned to them by the district.

Key findings from include:

Nearly all displaced students ended up in schools with higher
performance ratings than the schools they had previously attended (93
percent), though most of these schools were not substantially higher
performing. While most displaced students did end up in schools
with better performance ratings than their previous schools, more than
one-third remained in schools designated Level 3, the district’s lowest
rating. Just 21 percent ended up in Level 1 schools, the district’s top
rated schools. Prior research from UChicago CCSR found that only
displaced students who ended up in substantially higher-performing
schools (the top quartile in the district) saw improvement.

One-third of students did not enroll in district-designated welcoming schools.
Of these, more than half landed in schools that were lower-rated than
those assigned to them by the district. Because the district targeted
most of their transition plans to the welcoming schools, these students
also missed out on the extra resources given to the welcoming schools.

Proximity to home was the deciding factor in most enrollment decisions.
Whether they enrolled in a designated welcoming school, a higher-rated
school, or a lower-rated school, most families based their decision
first and foremost on location. Indeed, students travelled about the
same distance from home whether they attended a high- or low-rated
school, suggesting that parents chose higher-rated schools primarily
when they were nearby. Although parents were seeking schools that met
their children’s academic needs, they also felt compelled to choose a
school in their neighborhood, oftentimes because of safety concerns.
Finding a school close to home was not simply about convenience but also
about practical circumstances and realities, including access to a car
and work schedules.

For many families academic quality meant something different than a schools' performance policy rating.
The way that many parents defined academic quality was different than
the official markers of quality represented by the district’s
performance policy rating system. For example, many families defined
academic quality as having after-school programs, certain curricula and
courses, small class sizes, positive and welcoming school environments,
and/or one-on-one attention from teachers in classes. Although some
families did talk about their school’s official policy rating, most
factored in these other "unofficial" indicators of academic quality when
making their school choice decisions.

Few matters of
international education policy have achieved as much consensus as the
claim that teachers in U.S. public schools spend nearly twice as much
time leading classes as their counterparts in such high-performing
nations as Finland, Japan, and other nations belonging to the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Yet this
claim is far from true, Samuel E. Abrams explains in a new CBCSE study
entitled The Mismeasure of Teaching Time.

Teachers in U.S. public
schools work hard, for relatively low pay, and under increasingly
stressful conditions because of federally mandated high-stakes tests.
But they do not, as reported annually since 2000 by the OECD in its
compendium of educational statistics, Education at a Glance, spend so much more time instructing students than teachers in other OECD nations.

Through repetition by
journalists and scholars, this misinformation has become conventional
wisdom. In the process, a myth has evolved misguiding comparative
analysis of staffing practices. This myth has moreover obscured telling
differences between the structure of the school day in the United States
and other OECD nations. Finally, this myth has overshadowed the
critical issue of inferior pay of U.S. teachers in comparison to that of
their OECD counterparts.

Abrams deconstructs the myth by exposing contradictions about teaching time within Education at a Glance; by revealing an error in data collection by the U.S. Department of Education that is behind the figures in Education at a Glance;
and by providing detailed documentation of teaching time in the United
States from a sample of rural, suburban, and urban school districts.

This study provides readers
with a clearer understanding of the workload and challenges of U.S.
teachers and refocuses debate about education policy.

About CBCSECBCSE's
mission is to improve the efficiency with which public and private
resources are employed in education. We conduct research to determine
the costs of educational programs as well as the economic value of
program impacts in order to encourage educators, evaluators and
policymakers to consider these factors in conjunction with program
effectiveness in addressing educational goals.

The real issue is not teachers, but concentrated poverty.

"For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority
of U.S. public school students come from low-income families, according
to a new analysis of 2013 federal data, a statistic that has profound
implications for the nation."

In 40 of the 50 states, low income
students comprised no less than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren.
In 21 states, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches were a
majority of the students in 2013.Most of the states
with a majority of low income students are found in the South and the
West. Thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of low income students
in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the other 21 states were
in the West.Mississippi led the nation with the highest
rate: ­71 percent, almost three out of every four public school children
in Mississippi, were low-income. The nation’s second highest rate was
found in New Mexico, where 68 percent of all public school students were
low income in 2013.

This should have major
implications for policies on education at both the national and state
levels, because it highlights this truth: the real educational issue in
the United States is not and never has been about poor quality among
teachers. Rather, it's about the concentration of poverty.
Let me
offer some data from recent international comparisons to underscore the
point: Finland, the highest scoring nation in recent years, has less
than 4% of its children in poverty. Even using somewhat out of date
statistics from OECD, which sponsors the PISA tests used to bash US
schools in comparison with international competitors, US schools with
less than 25% of their children in poverty perform as well as any
nation, and those with 10% or less of their children in poverty
outperform Finland.
Despite the existence of social welfare
programs in this country, we still have a problem of concentrated
poverty. Yes, we now offer free lunch and in some (but not enough) cases
free breakfasts to children from poverty. But that does not feed them
on the weekend, or if school is closed because of weather.
Children
in poverty are often food insecure. They may be homeless, or not that
far from being homeless. Their families lack consistent sources of
money. Even if they have access to health insurance through Medicaid or
SCHIP, it often does not cover vision, hearing or dental. They live in
neighborhoods where violence may make life itself insecure.
I am going to push fair use by quoting five consecutive paragraphs from the Poststory
to provide a sense of this. I understand this may be anecdotal, and the
plural of anecdote is not data. And yet, any teacher who has taught
students in high poverty situations, as I did briefly before my wife was
diagnosed with cancer, has experienced what you will encounter in these
five paragraphs:

“When they first come in my door
in the morning, the first thing I do is an inventory of immediate
needs: Did you eat? Are you clean? A big part of my job is making them
feel safe,” said Sonya Romero-Smith, a veteran teacher at Lew Wallace
Elementary School in Albuquerque. Fourteen of her 18 kindergartners are
eligible for free lunches.She helps them clean up with
bathroom wipes and toothbrushes, and she stocks a drawer with clean
socks, underwear, pants and shoes.Romero-Smith, 40, who
has been a teacher for 19 years, became a foster mother in November to
two girls, sisters who attend her school. They had been homeless, their
father living on the streets and their mother in jail, she said. When
she brought the girls home, she was shocked by the disarray of their
young lives.“Getting rid of bedbugs, that took us a
while. Night terrors, that took a little while. Hoarding food, flushing a
toilet and washing hands, it took us a little while,” she said. “You
spend some time with little ones like this and it’s gut wrenching. . . .
These kids aren’t thinking, ‘Am I going to take a test today?’ They’re
thinking, ‘Am I going to be okay?’"The job of teacher has expanded to “counselor, therapist, doctor, parent, attorney,” she said.

If
you are in a community with high levels of poverty, you are likely in a
community that lacks the tax base to provide decent public education,
even were the students not already disadvantaged in their basic living
situations.
The federal involvement in education beginning with
the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act under Lyndon Johnson,
who as a young man had taught children in schools populated by the
disadvantaged, had as a major goal addressing the needs of such
children. But somewhere along the way, too many in this nation seem to
have lost their souls when it comes to addressing those in poverty.
When
more than half of our school children are from low-income settings, and
far too many from situations of severe poverty, how can they - the
children - be held responsible for that? Where is our societal
responsibility not to condemn them to a lifetime of poverty? How is it
that we have allowed a small percentage to get disgustingly, even
obscenely wealthy, without acknowledging and addressing the increasing
percentage of our population whose economic situations continue to
worsen?
Those of us who teach do all we can to ameliorate the
difficulties with which children arrive in our classrooms. But what
happens outside school has a profound effect on what we can do in
school. We know these children will score lower on the kinds of tests we
are using to beat up on public education, but those of us who teach
also know that does not mean they cannot learn. Yet it is often
precisely these children, who need the enrichment of music and art and
poetry and drama and access to the things taken for granted by kids of
middle class settings and up, who lose the most when we cut out those
"frills" in order to raise scores on tests that really do not indicate a
higher level of learning.51% of our school children are low income.That
means we are not a middle class society any more. It 's an example of
American "exceptionalism" that should be a matter of deep concern. No,
that's not strong enough -- it's an example of a national shame.

The video is worth listening to. Dr. Nolan Cabrera presents on the "Cabrera Report" that was recently used by the 9th Circuit to note the discrimination embedded in the (un)constitutionality of HB2281, the bill banning Ethnic
Studies in Tucson USD.

-Angela

VIDEO: UA Professor of “whiteness” explains research that proves the success of Ethnic Studies in TUSD

Dr.
Nolan Cabrera is a professor at the University of Arizona who studies
“whiteness and white racism” in education. He is also the author of the
famous “Cabrera Report” which applied advanced statistical methods to
analyze the success of students who took Mexican American Studies in
TUSD to see if there was any significant increase in standardized test
scores compared to the other students.
We begin today’s introduction with what it means to study “whiteness” as a professor.
In a nutshell, according to Cabrera, he studies “the nature of white privilege, how it is maintained (especially within institutions of higher education), and how it can be challenged.”
For the more scholarly of our readers, Cabrera explains:

Whiteness
was created to ideologically justify the elevated social position of
people of European descent over all others. It maintained that whites
were inherently superior beings and therefore entitled to these being at
the top of the social hierarchy. Since then, whiteness has been
challenged (civil rights movement) and re-articulated as the social norm
by which people of all other racial groups are judged while still
maintaining the unearned privileges of being white.

Dr.
Cabrera was in San Francisco for the Ninth Circuit Federal Court
hearing on the constitutionality of HB2281, the bill that banned Ethnic
Studies in Tucson. He also attended the Ethnic Studies Now summit at
Mission High School before the court hearing and described his study
(video below) that proves the effectiveness of Mexican American Studies
in closing the achievement gap for Chican@ students.

The
study that Dr. Cabrera and his colleagues published was in the
prestigious American Education Research Journal and was entitled “Missing
the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees:
Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson.”
What
is amazing is that not only did MAS students do far better than all
other groups of students in TUSD, but there was actually a selection
bias where the lowest performing students took these classes. These
students did bad their freshman year and did even worse their sophomore
year. Then after taking MAS classes they outshone their colleagues on
standardized tests, even in math!
Furthermore, the more MAS classes the students took, the higher they scored!
Nolan
Cabrera explains his study in the video above, and we include excerpts
from the federal court trial that cite some of the statistics.

MAS students were 108% more likely to graduate than non-MAS students.

MAS students passed the standardized math test 140% more than non-MAS students.

The writing test, 162%.

The reading test, 168%.

Keep
in mind that these students came in with a major academic disadvantage
after their sophomore year and became scholars after taking an MAS
course, even in their mathematics classes. Even John Huppenthal’s
independent study found zero violations of the state law.
So why
is Arizona trying to ban classes that finally work in closing the
achievement gap for Mexican Americans, and why do they think these young
scholars are so dangerous that attempts to ban the classes were put
into homeland security bills before become state law?
Perhaps the educated mind of a minority youth in America is the great fear to those in power?

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Underwriting for
the content of this webinar has been provided by The Atlantic
Philanthropies, NoVo Foundation, The Raikes Foundation, and The
California Endowment.

This webinar took place on January 21, 2015 @ 2 p.m. ETView this on-demand webinar now.Download the PowerPoint presentation.Join us for this webinar from our Education Week Leaders To Learn
From virtual event series. The annual Leaders To Learn From special
report shines a light on forward-thinking district leaders who seize on
good ideas and execute them well in their school systems. Throughout
2015, we'll host webinars, live chats, and more virtual events related
to this year's Leaders.

To be considered successful in Tacoma, Wash., schools must show they can
deliver a lot more than good test scores. They should be able to
involve many children in extracurricular activities, attract lots of
adult volunteers, and reconnect with teenagers who have dropped out.
They need to spark praise from parents and students for providing a safe
and engaging place to study. They have to reach into their communities
to make sure all eligible children take advantage of district preK and
full-day kindergarten. They should be able to brag about how many
students are taking college-level courses.

They also have to show strong student performance, and growth, on state
tests. Typically, districts judge their schools’ success by state test
scores, attendance and graduation rates, reflecting their state’s chosen
accountability metrics. But this district of 30,000 students has
pioneered a local accountability system with a much broader conception
of success. Join this webinar to discover how to design a whole-child
accountability system for your district.

Johnson suggested that earlier efforts
to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply
confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that
kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just
because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts
doesn't mean that the money was wasted.

...and in fact, this money can be lifesaving. I take all of this to mean that equitable school funding does indeed matter. -Angela

Students listen to a substitute teacher, Deborah Pattin, in a temporary classroom in Olympia, Wash. (Ted S. Warren/AP)

Beginning
40 years ago, a series of court rulings forced states to
reallocate money for education, giving more to schools in poor
neighborhoods with less in the way of local resources. Critics such as
Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution, argued these
decisions were simply "throwing money at schools." His research found that there was little correlation between how much schools spent and how well their students performed on tests.
It's
a view still held by many politicians today, including Gov. Andrew
Cuomo (D-N.Y.). "We spend more than any other state in the country," he said a year ago. "It ain't about the money. It's about how you spend it — and the results."More recent research,
however, has found that when schools have more money, they are able
to give their students a better education. A new study on those who went
to school during the school-finance cases a few decades ago found that
those who attended districts that were affected by the rulings were more
likely to stay in school through high school and college and are making
more money today.
The authors, Kirabo Jackson and Claudia
Persico of Northwestern University and Rucker Johnson of the University
of California, Berkeley, released a revised draft
of their as-yet-unpublished paper this week. The benefits were most
obvious for students from poor families. They found that a 10 percent
increase in the money available for each low-income student resulted in a
9.5 percent increase in students' earnings as adults. A public
investment in schools, they wrote, returned 8.9 percent annually for a
typical pupil who started kindergarten in 1980.
The findings are
evidence that public schooling can be a way for children who grow up in
poverty to overcome their circumstances, Johnson argued.
"Those
increases in instructional expenditures proved to have large dividends,
significant economic returns, in the lives of these children," he said.
"We're always searching for what can break that cycle of poverty from
one generation to the next."
The study used data on incomes for 15,353 people. The oldest subjects will turn 60 this year.
"What
I like about this study is that the authors didn't shy away from
proving what many of us consider the obvious," wrote Bruce Baker, a
professor at Rutgers University and an expert on school funding, in an
email. "If you have it, you can spend it, and if you don't you can't."
As
for why his group came to a different conclusion than the one reached
by Hanushek and other skeptics, Johnson suggested that earlier efforts
to find a a connection between school spending and results were simply
confounded by the range of factors that affect the kinds of adults that
kids become. Lawmakers send additional money to poor districts, but just
because their students don't do as well as those in affluent districts
doesn't mean that the money was wasted.
The group
used the series court rulings to compare students from otherwise
similar circumstances in different places around the country, some of
whom attended schools where funding was increased, and others who did
not.
Another explanation could be that the benefits of a better
education might not become apparent for decades. Johnson said that the
difference in earnings was more pronounced for adults in their prime,
not for younger adults.
Still, the authors don't advocate simply
throwing money at the problem of education, either. "Money matters, but
it matters how it's spent," said Jackson of Northwestern.
The group found
that the increased funding had the greatest effect if it was used to
raise teachers' salaries, reduce class sizes or lengthen the school
year. That conclusion accords with other research
finding that better teachers can have profound effects on how much
students learn, since the schools with the smallest classes and the
highest salaries can attract the most talented instructors.

Max Ehrenfreund is a blogger on the Financial desk and writes for Know More and Wonkblog.

NOVEMBER 1966: Reies Lopez Tijerina of Albuquerque, N.M., in a
press conference at the Albany Hotel, said the Spanish-named Americans
of the Southwest are of a breed born in 1914.

1 of 9

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Reies Lopez Tijerina,
a Pentecostal preacher turned activist who led a violent raid of a
northern New Mexico courthouse nearly 50 years ago, died Monday. He was
88.

Family representative Estela Reyes-Lopez
said Tijerina, who helped spark the radical Chicano movement, died at
an El Paso, Texas, hospital, of natural causes. Nephew Luis Tijerina
also confirmed the death.

Tijerina,
who had been battling a number of illnesses, including a heart
condition, had to use a wheelchair in recent years but still
occasionally gave speeches.

While
admired by some students, his activism was steeped in violence and his
legacy remained controversial. He also drew criticism for his treatment
of women and comments largely viewed as anti-Semitic.

In
1963, Tijerina founded La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, an organization
that sought to reclaim Spanish and Mexican land grants held by Mexicans
and American Indians in the Southwest before the U.S.-Mexican War.

Four
years later, Tijerina and followers raided the courthouse in Tierra
Amarilla to attempt a citizen's arrest of the district attorney after
eight members of Tijerina's group had been arrested over land grant
protests.

During
the raid, the group shot and wounded a state police officer and jailer,
beat a deputy, and took the sheriff and a reporter hostage before
escaping to the Kit Carson National Forest.

Tijerina
was arrested but ultimately acquitted of charges directly related to
the raid. He did eventually spend about two years in prison for federal
destruction of property. The raid outraged some, but it sparked
excitement among Mexican-American college students of the Chicano
movement.

It
also placed Tijerina as one of the leaders in "Four Horsemen of the
Chicano Movement," which included Cesar Chavez of California, Corky Gonzales of Colorado, and Jose Angel Gutierrez of Texas. Tijerina was later dubbed "King Tiger" and compared to Malcolm X.

After the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid, the land-grant movement in the American Southwest became more widely accepted.

David Correia,
author of "Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in
Northern New Mexico," said before the raid, land grant battles were just
"local property right" issues. "He brought international attention to
land grants and made them part of a larger struggle," Correia said.
Some, however, can't forget the violence he brought. Michael Olivas, a Santa Fe resident and law professor at the University of Houston, said his cousin, Eulogio Salazar, the courthouse jailer who was shot in the cheek during raid, was later beaten to death.

Salazar
testified in a court hearing that he was shot by Tijerina, but that
case never made it to trial. His death remained unsolved.

"He
is not a hero," Olivas said, referring to Tijerina, who he has long
blamed for his cousin's death. "He was not even from New Mexico."

In
his later years, Tijerina also spoke of numerology and an apocalyptic
end of the world, Correia said. It was part of his way of explaining his
importance using dates and anniversaries, Correia said.
"I think he'd be real excited that he died on Martin Luther King Day," Correia said. "Numbers meant something to him."

Tijerina
was born in Fall City, Texas, in 1923 to migrant farmworkers. He is
survived by his wife of 22 years, Esperanza, and his children,
Reyes-Lopez said.

Monday, January 19, 2015

Why are school districts paying
millions in "finder's fees" to an organization that places people
without education degrees to teach in urban schools—even where
applications from veteran teachers abound?

2015-Low income students are now a majority of the schoolchildren
attending the nation’s public schools, according to this research
bulletin. The latest data collected from the states by the National
Center for Education Statistics (NCES), show that 51 percent of the
students across the nation’s public schools were low income in 2013.

In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less than 40
percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible
for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in
2013.Most of the states with a majority of low income students are found
in the South and the West. Thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of
low income students in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the
other 21 states were in the West.Mississippi led the nation with the highest rate: ­71 percent, almost
three out of every four public school children in Mississippi, were
low-income. The nation’s second highest rate was found in New Mexico,
where 68 percent of all public school students were low income in 2013.This
defining moment in America’s public education has been developing over
several decades, and SEF has documented the trends and implications in
two prior reports. In its 2013 report, SEF Vice President Steve Suitts
wrote: “No longer can we consider the problems and needs of low income
students simply a matter of fairness… Their success or failure in the
public schools will determine the entire body of human capital and
educational potential that the nation will possess in the future.
Without improving the educational support that the nation provides its
low income students – students with the largest needs and usually with
the least support -- the trends of the last decade will be prologue for a
nation not at risk, but a nation in decline…" Download the research bulletinand map.

Students should retain their bilingual heritage for its economic value

In
a few short months in California and across the nation, white,
middle-class parents value bilingualism enough to stand in line in the
early morning hours to sign up their children for a spot in next fall's
dual-language kindergarten.

This is great because as a nation, we celebrate bilingualism, right?
Well, sort of. Just not for those kids who already speak another language at home.
In
November 2016, California voters will have the opportunity to decide if
bilingualism is of value for all students, not just those from
well-educated, middle-class families.
Teachers frequently
emphasize the importance of English above all else when they speak with
immigrant parents. Even worse, many nonnative English-speaking parents
are told not to speak to their children in the language they know best,
depriving them of their richest source of social, emotional and
linguistic support.
The reality is these parents who sign up their
kids for dual-language kindergarten are onto something. They recognize
what many teachers, principals and policymakers do not: Knowing two or
more languages puts you at an advantage.
There are certainly
significant social, psychological and cognitive benefits to being
bilingual: higher test scores, better problem solving skills, sharper
mental acuity and greater empathy. Good for the individual, good for
society.

But, despite all we know, bilingual education was banned in California and remains under attack across the country.
Why?
Because what matters most in America is the bottom line. It's almost as
if educators and policymakers are blind to the advantages of
bilingualism.
Economists. using census data, find little, if any,
benefit to bilinguals' earning power. However, census data is too blunt
and too broad to understand the nuanced relationship between
bilingualism and the economy.
We now have better measures of
bilingualism and individuals' ability to read and write in non-English
languages. We also have measures of employers' preferences as they enter
the Information Age.
In this era of the Internet and global
communications, companies rely more frequently on bilingual and
biliterate employees to serve as liaisons with clients both local and
global. Even when being bilingual is not a requirement, employers report
a preference for both hiring and retaining bilinguals, all else held
equal: buy one, get one free.
Currently, more than 20 percent of
the U.S. population and 44 percent of Californians speak a non-English
language and many of these speakers are children.
Our schools
have the opportunity to ensure that potential bilinguals grow into
bilingual, biliterate adults who are able to contribute to and
participate in a stronger American economic base.
Following the
horrible events of 9/11, the U.S. government found itself lacking in
reliable Pashtun, Farsi and Arabic translators. Even though many
U.S.-born children of immigrants from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran are
educated in our schools, by young adulthood they will lose their native
languages.
Until we change how schools approach languages other
than English, the state department will lose the potential of children
of immigrants to translate and broker the two worlds for them.
Being bilingual doesn't just benefit the individual. It benefits the community, the nation and ultimately, the economy.
Not
only are bilingual young adults more likely to graduate high school and
go to college, they are also more likely to get the job once they
interview and remain employed during layoffs.
Ultimately, many of us intuitively grasp the cognitive, social and psychological benefits of knowing two languages.
As
a nation, we now need to recognize bilingualism's economic benefits if
we expect to remain a global leader into the next century.
California
schools should help students maintain the home language -- whether via
bilingual instruction or encouraging the parents to develop their
children's home language skills.
As a K-12 educator in
California, and now as an educational researcher, I assure you that
immigrant children will learn English. Where we fail these children is
in maintaining their greatest resource: their home language.
It's something we should cherish, not eradicate. I hope in two years, voters in California agree.

Rebecca
Callahan, who holds degrees from UC San Diego and UC Davis, is an
assistant professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of
Education in The University of Texas at Austin. She is also a former
teacher in California public schools.